In the bathroom I attended to my scant morning ritual: trying not to fall asleep on the toilet, brushing my teeth while shying away from the cold water, and changing into a set of hospital scrubs and thick socks. I had a choice between my mother’s cheery Birthing Center scrubs, pink, yellow or dotted with fluffy sheep and cutesy ducks, or my father’s ER scrubs- dark blue and angular, too large for me, with the hospital’s logo stitched across the breast pocket. I grabbed the blue pair, tied my hair into a messy clump at the base of my neck and slowly plodded downstairs.
Down in the kitchen, I found my mom already bustling around getting my breakfast ready. I grunted a greeting, grunted thanks, sank down slowly into a chair at the table and glanced indifferently around me as my brain began to process the signals from my eyes. The rounded white kitchen counter ran from one end of the kitchen to the other, crowded with various appliances and a large wicker basket that held stacks of mail not useless enough to throw away, not important enough to ever need. The wall was another cluster of accumulation; about 20 frames line the pink and beige wall that was sponge painted years ago by my mother and me. Decked out in painter’s hats (that I insisted she buy), we had cleared the kitchen and bludgeoned the wall with our pink-stained porous sponges. Atop this interior design masterpiece lay a random assortment of framed images my mother had taken a fancy to. One birthday card I’d donated to the kitchen when she fell in love with it: a photo of a pig in cow slippers captioned Moo-shoe Pork. A small painting from Cheap Art II of a piano perched on a cloud with two pairs of lips floating above the lid of the instrument. A book of sheet music titled: ‘If you beat the L out of Kelly, He’d Still Be Kelly to Me’ with a monkey-ish Irish man grinning up from an impish dance.
My eyes considered all these familiar eccentricities in my warm kitchen, an island of movement and purpose in the sea of incoherent night. I turned to the boot rack, grabbed my boots, and began the tedious process of jamming my feet in them and tying up ten stories of laces. When my resisting fingers had finally knotted and double knotted each in place, I sat up in time to watch my mom place my breakfast in front of me. She smiled at me for a moment while I tried to articulate thanks, and then turned away to clear up so she could slip back into her bed. At this point in the morning, when I was barely able to form words, solid food was out of the question. I downed a glass of water and took a few bites of the banana, gathering the second stage of my meal and hurrying to pull on my sweater, coat, neck warmer, hat and gloves.
I headed out into the garage, ignoring the biting sting of the cold air as I grabbed my bag and hauled it out to my car. I didn’t look at the thermometer hanging in the window to my left. I didn’t want to think about negative degrees as I trudged through the ice-crusted snow. The world was silent and veiled in darkness and I stomped through the peace with each crunch of my boot. I started my car, turning the heat to full blast and revving the engine a few times, trying to circulate some warmth into the system. I wrapped my clumsy gloved hands around the ice scraper and began shaving the frost off every inch of the car. Twenty minutes later, when my little car had turned into another island of warmth in the pitch black December morning, I sped off, snow tires scraping along slick empty streets. I glanced at the clock as I turned off my street, I needed to hurry, but also not fly off the road. I raced across town, a ghost of its normal self, up a steep hill, and through the country towards the rink. Up hills I revved the engine, down hills my foot poised above the brake. My car was always barely maintaining purchase as fluffy flakes appeared suddenly in the arch of my high beams, adding another layer to the crunch and slide of the road below. The view during this ride was surreal and unearthly. The flakes that ambled lazily towards the ground streaked against the windshield as my vehicle crashed through them. I reached light speed, the blurring spots of light ahead of me and empty pitch black behind me. There were no streetlights, no lights of any kind save mine, no other cars, no colors, no sounds, no world outside of me, the white road beneath me, the fluffy stars around me, and the growling time machine I sat in.
This isolation lasted until I finally arrived in Northfield, where lights that existed besides and despite me again lined my path. I took the last sip of my hot chocolate and grasped the last handful of dry Cheerios before I turned into the vast, empty parking lot of Norwich. In the building to my left I saw the last rows of a regiment marching out of the cold. The first year cadets at Norwich have to walk in straight lines, turning only at 90˚ angles, for a whole year. They stepped smartly through the door, leaving behind the wide marks of a till in the snow. My car glided around to the side entrance of the largest building. More awake and yet more desolate than my backyard was when I departed, the parking area was flat for hundreds of yards in every direction, my car the last in a small line of vehicles that stood alone on this windswept, man-made plain. Some light was warming the east section of the sky, dark grey now lined one edge of the blackness. I propped my bag and my equipment up on my shoulder, pushed through the doors with my other shoulder, and started down the long hallways towards the locker rooms. The Kreitzberg Arena, beneath the general admissions area, consisted of cold, grey hallways with entrances to the rink on the right and a line of locker rooms on your left. Stomping down, I turned into Locker Room 3 where most of my team was already changing. I smiled as I entered, found a large area at the end of a bench, and began shedding outer layers and strapping on equipment. I exchanged a brief greeting with the two girls on the bench with me, smiling again, and then turned down to concentrate on my cold, smelly layers of equipment.
The entire locker room was filled with the stench of sweaty leather, a smell unique to ice hockey, which I haven’t encountered with any other sport or activity of any kind. The chilly air did keep the smell as just an afterthought, maybe one of the reasons we play on ice. The girls around me chatted and joked, and I remained quiet while I yanked the straps back on my leg pads, bending the padding to contour to my body. This could have been because I was up earlier, arrived later, in a rush and more tired than the other girls. Whatever the reason was, it was one of the first times I would be completely comfortable feeling alone in a large group of people. My mouth was shut and my mind occupied with the intensity of the coming practice. However it happened, morning after morning, 4:00 am four days a week before school, away to games on two other days, I played on this team and exchanged little more social contact than some half-hearted small talk and a few smiles. This morning, like so many others, I found myself filled with a foggy autonomy that was both new and surprising.
I used the loud and pungent locker room to think, piling on layer after layer of protective gear in a familiar ritual and running my mind over my two pad stack. Ready and ungainly in my massive suit, I followed the last of my teammates out into the rink, and stepped heavily onto the ice. And here sleep finally left me, the fog whipped away. My brain opened up as I swayed and sliced my way across the ice, gripping and regripping my stick in my right hand, and rolling my wrist in anticipation. The stands that opened up around us were empty, the ice well lit, and the cold air a caress that we rushed through as we circled rink. I felt large and formidable; I stood at over six feet tall in my skates, every inch of my body was extended by 4 inches thanks to my equipment, and I loomed over the other girls. Equipment could not weigh me down and my clumsy nature that normally plagued me shed away in this arena; my every movement was precise and powerful.
Northfield girl’s hockey team was one of the best in the area, and I was their goalie. A month ago I was an unknown quantity, a girl from Montpelier that finagled her way onto the team because her town didn’t have one. Starting off, I had been the second string, a strong second, but new and sometimes liable to mishandle an easy shot and let it slip past. A strong second string who became first string when the other goalie flunked off the team. At this point, I was their goalie, and as the drills began, here, unlike the locker room, I was comfortable with my team. They needed me and I needed them and I trusted and adored them on the ice. Also, I finally became very vocal. Sliding forward into the goal, my anticipation was finally over. We set up a game, the third-string goalie mirroring me at the other end as I centered myself in the goal, smacked the posts with my stick and sank down into my stance. Gliding forward, I sat back, my thighs almost horizontal to the ice, every muscle tense and focused on that one black spot on the vast bright ice. With each move of the puck I readjusted myself, sometimes just the weight slightly from the balls of my feet, sometimes with a few turns of my feet, retreating back towards the net, hands up, tense and ready, stick solidly braced against the ice in front of me, my eyes glued to the puck. A goalie moves far less than the rest of the team, but each muscle carries the weight of the game on it. A single misstep costs the team so much in games where you win or lose by a goal or two. Move too early and expose your weak side for an easy goal. Too late and you’ll watch that puck slide right beneath your legs into the back of the net. I savored this pressure, focusing on every muscle, pushing my eyes onto that puck with a cold and humming intensity. After a few minutes of keeping my stance, during which the puck never crossed the centerline, I was covered with sweat that beaded down my face. All I could see was the geometric shape of my defense, the threatening movements of their forwards, and that small black puck that I desperately wanted to come towards me as much as I wanted my defense to knock it away. A few times I screamed out at my defensemen, banging my stick for emphasis as I yelled for them to get OUT of my line of sight, for them to come back and play D, for them to get it OUT. The goalie’s line of sight is everything. I exhausted myself staring at that puck.
And when it did finally come at me, a clean break away that I both lusted for and feared, the clarity that took over my brain and body was intoxicating. I was ten feet from the goal as she started towards me, and, never moving my hands or my stick, I quickly cut back towards the net, always watching for a slap shot, for a pass, always mirroring her every movement as she descended upon me. Deeking repeatedly, she swooped down on my right and I glided alongside her, aware of every part of my blocking body, elbows turned out, legs ready to splay across the ice, the trapper on my hand opened wide and waiting. She took a shot that banged against my leg pads as I fell into a butterfly split. The punk bounced right back into her reach, and she shot another flick up to the left corner of the net. Swinging my hand down, I snatched the puck out of the air in my trapper, ending play and prompting the shriek of the whistle. With two echoing bangs, my teammates smacked their sticks against the ice in cheer of my save, and, with another whistle blast, we started again.
Back in the locker room I stretched my aching limbs. Looser than ever, I strained my legs to their new elasticity before they could snap back to my normal stiffness. I felt the giddiness of release, having conquered two taxing hours of practice, and actually warmed up to my teammates, but I had to go, out of time. After a snippet or two of small talk I hurried out of the locker room clad again in my arctic winter gear. Beneath the fleece and flannel I was wearing the Vermont uniform of jeans and a sweater, the scrubs and the equipment were a tangle in my bag stuffed in the trunk. I rushed my car back over the hills towards Montpelier and my first class. Life bubbled up through the frost on all sides during this journey, and I slowed as I passed kids shuffling off the cold at the side of the road while waiting for the bus. Vermont was beautiful again, the light opened up the fields around me. I switched on the radio and sang out in the bright morning light and made it just in time for first period at 7:45. I grinned at Max and Dan’s thumb war turned wrestling match as I crossed the room and sank into the chair next to Bekah. She immediately launched into a bit of juicy new gossip. I half-listened while trying to subtly lean away from her. I never had time to shower, and I was acutely aware of the slight stench of that ripe locker room clinging to me. However curiosity quickly trumped self-consciousness and I was soon drawn into the story and the scandal unfolding in our small and incestuous circle of friends. I didn’t notice when the teacher walked in and he had to clear his throat a few times before we turned away from each other, postponing our predictions for our classmates until after we engaged in some book learning to start our day.
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